Entrepreneur: Tempe health-tech startup signs major partner, receives patent

Health-tech startup Life365 Inc. is expanding fast as it negotiates more partnerships to connect patients at home to doctors to keep them out of the hospital.

Life365 brings together available, connected technology through its health software platform to allow remote patient monitoring, said Kent Dicks, Life365 CEO, founder, chairman and president.

“We offer a tablet for patients to take general information and communicate with their doctor,” said Dicks, an experienced tech founder in his third company. “With the shift to value-based care, and through our cloud-based platform, patients can get the care they need at home, instead of going to the doctor’s office or hospital. We are the tech-connect solution for in-home health care.”

The Tempe startup also is working on a LifeConnect Band that will debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. Life365, which has 10 patents pending, was granted a patent this month for any medical device intended for home use that talks to wearables. 

Life365 is working on its “careable”/wearable LifeConnect Band that will debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.

 

The startup’s newest partnership is with American Medical Response Inc., a Greenwood Village, Colorado-based provider of ground and air medical transportation.

Life365’s product will complement AMR’s services by allowing patient work to be done at home instead of taking patients to the hospital. Seventy percent of ambulance calls do not need the patient to be taken for emergency hospital care, Dicks said.

“We’re changing the model of care,” said Dicks, who graduated from Arizona State University with a bachelor’s degree in computer information systems. “We want things on our terms, and health care is no different. Home is the extension of our health-care system.”

Kent Dicks is Life365’s CEO, founder, chairman and president.

The partnership will allow health plans, health-care systems and local communities across the U.S. to leverage the latest technology and health-care expertise of more than 35,000 clinicians and support staff covering 47 states and the district of Columbia, according to a release.

“We see the potential in working with Life365 and believe it will help us grow our remote care monitoring program and offer an unmatched level of service to our customers,” Burton said in a statement.

Life365 is in negotiations with six other health-care companies.

“We’re taking today’s health solutions and being pragmatic about it,” Dicks said. “We take off-the-shelf solutions and bundle it together onto a common platform.”

The startup is taking advantage of growing home health-care options with in-home reimbursement available because of new laws, Dicks said.

When Dicks started his second company, MedApps, in 2006, it went through ASU’s Technopolis incubator and won a $30,000 grant from the Teresa Heinz Kerry Foundation. At the time, he said knew the market was just starting to evolve. Dicks calls Phoenix-based MedApps the first Internet of Things of health care.

MedApps was sold to Waltham, Massachusetts-based Alere Inc. in 2012 for $30 million.

Dicks continued with Alere as a division CEO and president until January 2015, and after taking time off, he started Life365 in September 2015.

Life365 has raised $2.5 million in a seed round from local angel investors and management. The startup was one of six winners in December 2017 for the Arizona Commerce Authority’s Arizona Innovation Challenge, and won the innovator of the year award for a startup company in November 2016 from the Governor’s Celebration of Innovation Awards. 

Life365 was a part of the BioAccel accelerator, a Phoenix biotech nonprofit focused on building a bioscience startup and investment ecosystem in Arizona.

Life365 also has been a finalist in several local pitching events, including this year's Street Pitch and Venture Madness competitions.

Dicks, who was born and raised in Phoenix and graduated from Camelback High School, sold his first company, Aztech Professional Services, a Phoenix-based staffing company, for an undisclosed price to Express Personnel in 2008.

Prior to that, Dicks was a programmer for American Express Co. (NYSE: AXP) in Phoenix and Texas Instruments Inc. (Nasdaq: TXN) in Dallas.

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